Twitter has been used in many ways as an excellent platform for marketing and promotion. Twitter contests emerged to be one of the simplest and most efficient means for companies and brands to promote their products. They are usually entered with a simple tweet, one that gives the participants a chance to win a prize. Tweets serve as a viral element for the contest holder to promote his/her services; the better the prize offered, the better chance for the promoter’s message to reach more people.

Last month we compiled a list of 15 running Twitter contests which caught the attention of many people, it motivated us to repeat the list and schedule it as a monthly post. Below are the most recent Twitter contests running for November:

Last week, Google announced its experimenting with a new social search feature. The feature simply combines your Twitter, Facebook, Google (…etc) contacts and friends and includes their photos, updates and entries in your search results.

Besides the immediate “this is interesting and should be useful” thought, it got me wondering, do we really want that? Think of it from this: without the option of having each and every update of your friends searchable, people were complaining about others “stalking” them on Facebook and MySpace. Imagine now, when instead of just inferring information from the bits and pieces everyone posted, you can actually search for whatever you want to learn about.

Imagine a thieve looking for an easy target to steal with 1000 “friends” on Facebook and 10,000 Twitter followers. A simple “vacation+from” search on Google, limiting it by time, would get him all “friends” out of town. Now, we can agree that the user who posted the “I’m on vacation from-to” online is an idiot, while Google is just making it easier to track all of that.

Below is the video introduction of Google’s social search experiment. Let us know your thoughts.

Despite all the negative publicity about social media in relation to privacy related issues, intrusive advertising and safety problems, recently, I am developing this feeling that social media is currently specializing in creating opportunities to save lives more than take them!"

The small laws, the big laws, the rightful laws, the new laws, the old laws and so on; the wide list of law descriptive terms is endless! Yet, when it comes to freedom, especially over a loose medium such as the Internet, there is but one question one should ask: Are the laws unlawfully limiting the freedom of individuals using the...

Twitter will roll out a new feature that adds locations to tweets. That opens the door for developers to innovate and come up with new applications to take advantage of the new feature. We list some of the ideas we have in mind and look forward to the innovation of the developers.

Apart for the Twitter avatar and background, what would influence your choice of people to follow on Twitter? How many Twitter users have you unfollowed due to their user names? What is the best method for companies to benefit from Twitter user names?

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